Beast 0.13

The Beast Project

Beast 0.11.0 Walkthrough

About Beast

Beast is a digital synthesizer and music creation system, released as
Free Software under the
GNU LGPL-2.1+.
It has support for Linux Audio Plugins (LADSPA), multi-track editing, unlimited undo, real-time synthesis,
MIDI and various audio formats like WAV, AIFF, Vorbis, Soundfont 2, Gus Patch, FLAC and MP3 files,
32bit audio rendering, full duplex support, multi-core audio rendering, SIMD utilisation,
precise timing at sample granularity, FFT spectrograms and MIDI automation.
The project is translated into a variety of languages.

Platforms

Beast’s core is written in C++ to yield maximum performance, especially on multi core systems.
As of late, a new UI is being developed (background article)
based on the latest web developments.
The project is primarily developed on Linux, supporting 64-bit and 32-bit platforms.
A Windows port has been started but is looking for volounteers.
Contributions to support other platforms are very welcome.

Downloads

Beast releases are available as source code tarballs and binary packages.
The source code is licensed LGPL-2.1+,
and the project uses Git for distributed source code development.

Development

The Beast development source code and issue tracker are hosted at github.
The Beast project is split into two components, the user interface, currently implemented in Gtk+ and the Bse library.
BSE is the Beast Sound Engine, it implements all the neccessary synthesis and music processing logic needed for Beast.
A new user interface version is in development, using W3C technologies based on Electronjs.

Beast 0.12.0 Release

Monday 20th August 2018

Beast 0.12.0 is released (full announcement).
This release removes the Rapicorn dependency as well as the runtime dependency on CPython.

It brings a number of optimizations and bug fixes, but most notably, this is the
first release that installs the new ebeast UI. A tracks view, piano rolls and dB meters
are already implemented, but not much beyond that as it’s still in pre-alpha stage.

The Beast binary package (DEB, now without Rapicorn) is provided together with the
release tarball to install Beast directly on a recent Ubuntu.

New Beast Website

Sunday 6th August 2017

The new and much simpler Beast website is now live.
The site uses a completely new theme, has lots of updates, is more comprehensive and loads faster.
Now we also feature new material like video and instrument links.

Beast 0.11.0 Release

The Beast 0.11 release brings a truckload of new stuff like Soundfont support thanks to Stefan Westerfeld,
true multi threading for the DSP module calculations, faster startup times and a number of optimizations
and bug fixes. Notably the packaging scheme has been adapted so that Beast now installs everything in its
own directory under $prefix/lib/beast-<version>/.
Also new is a Beast binary package (DEB, including the Rapicorn dependency) provided together with the
release taraballs to install Beast right away.